With access to the internet, or world wide web (www), users today have a plethora of available information that can be used to make informed choices and decisions. Moreover, with the increased technology and sophistication of current mobile devices, e.g., lap top computers, cell phones, smart phones, etc., users can access the internet from myriad locations to acquire data points and help inform their decisions on a variety of issues and matters.
For an example, there are a large number of people today who dine out at a restaurant, fast food joint, food cart, etc., collectively eating establishments, for one or more meals on any given day of a week. And users' health affected by their diet is a significant issue for many of these same people. Weight gain, and indeed obesity, diabetes and various other health issues and illnesses due to or otherwise exacerbated by unhealthy diet choices currently plague many people.
However, many eating establishments do not advertise, or make readily available, nutritional information, e.g., calories, sugar content, etc., for the food they serve. Consequently, users generally face difficulties in trying to ascertain what eating establishments serve healthy dishes, or at any particular eating establishment, which dish(es) are optimum nutritional choices for them. Adding to the issue of a lack of advertised nutritional information is that, generally without legal incentives, such as laws requiring the publication of nutritional information, eating establishments typically do not spend the time to identify and publish their menu's nutritional value. This is generally for a host of reasons, including, e.g., the eating establishment does not want to advertise that their dishes may not be relatively nutritious and eating establishment menus change and it requires time, effort, and expense to update the consequent nutritional data.
As a second example, there are myriad shopping malls in the United States and all over the world, each housing generally a variety of stores. Shoppers may have various choices on which mall to visit and shop at and would find it useful to have at least a subset of malls rated and/or ranked by one or more criteria such as, e.g., average cost of goods sold at a mall's stores, variety of stores and/or goods sold, relative quality of the goods sold at the mall stores, etc. However, this information is not identified and readily available to shoppers, i.e., users. Thus, users must bring their own understanding, which may not be accurate, and a certain amount of luck to selecting a mall that suits any particular shopping excursion needs.
It would be desirable to independently automatically gather information for one or more myriad issues, including the above-identified examples of food nutrition and shopping mall criteria, and analyze the information with other relevant available data to generate decisional data that can be used to support user-informed determinations on an issue. It would further be desirable to utilize the computational and communicative power of a user's mobile device to assist a user to access output created from generated decisional data in a quick, efficient manner with minimal user effort to help effect optimal user determinations.